> It's okay to be racist against Indians according to hacker news guidelines
Please let's not respond to false or mean comments by making up more false or mean things. Nothing could be further against the HN guidelines. We (and I personally) have banned many accounts for posting slurs against Indians (same as against any other group), including in this thread.
The only reason posts like that would go unmoderated is that we haven't seen them. We don't come close to seeing everything (or even 10%) of what gets posted to HN. We rely on users to point us to the things that most need attention, so the helpful way to react to such a comment is to flag it and/or email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
I've never seen let alone worked in a team that only had white people. Not once. I've never seen nor heard of a team that only had Japanese or Koreans or Russians or any other singular group except two: Chinese and Indians. These two groups have a unique tendency to form ethnically exclusive teams at companies and get away with it.
I have seen exclusively white people teams, especially at smaller startups. They were all Americans though, so not much diversity of nationalities.
Given that China and India are countries with 1.4B population, no surprise that one can find enough people to form exclusively Chinese (or Indian) teams. Another factor is that people from other backgrounds do not want to join such teams even if the hiring manager makes them an offer. When I was at a FAANG, my team composition slowly drifted towards only Chinese and Indian, as people from other backgrounds left in 6-12 months after an Indian manager came in.
I'm sure it happens at small companies, but at large companies I've never seen it. It wouldn't be allowed to stay that way if it did happen. The number of times I've seen it happen with Chinese and Indians teams, relative to how rare it is for white-only teams to exist, seems highly improbable. White people are the plurality if not majority at most big American tech companies, so if it's all just statistical noise it should happen more with white people and that just isn't what happens.
I have seen enough white-only teams while at FAANG. Those were not in SV but in smaller US cities. Of course that was rare but then again, chinese-only or indian-only teams were rare as well.
Around 2012, I attended the very first coding bootcamp in SF. We had a demo day and a (white) recruiter from a local start-up came and literally only talked to every one of the white students (in a class that was half white) but none of the non-white students. Not a single one. When walking by a table with a non-white student, he would just said "excuse me" and squeezed pass. I looked up the company's website later and it was a 50-ish person start-up that was all white males, except 1 Asian girl who was a PM.
Now, I'm sure the people at this start-up would probably not think of themselves as "racist" (especially in liberal SF) even though this recruiter behaved in a racially exclusive way. But it really goes to show how subconscious these instincts are. This is why it's unfair to single out Indians/Chinese in this case as the only ones who have an in-group bias; every group has an in-group bias if we're really being honest here.
Having said that, the best tech teams I've worked in have been very diverse. They were high performant, but also had a great deal of trust in each other. I think it's because every one knows every one else is a high performer and trust each other's judgment. Nobody is just here because they "just gel with the vibes" and playing group-politics, which sometimes falls on racial lines.
Generalizing everyone from a region/group with some negative trait is racisam.
If your brain try to label me as someone who practice caste system because you think I am from India is lazy/stupid computation and racism.
Actually vast majority of the Indians suffer from negative consequences of Castisam since they are supposed to be lower classes and society descrimated against them historically.
They want equality more than probably anyone you know of.
Indian constitution has done a lot for eliminating this. But there is a lot of cultural baggage that needs cleanup.
